The Role of Analytics in Customer Empathy

Analytics generates insights and recommendations that propel customer empathy into action.

The essence of customer empathy

When we understand the emotional experience of our customers, we become better equipped to deliver meaningful experiences that fulfill their needs and solve their problems. The process of generating customer empathy is an organizational mindset that strives to create emotional connections between teams and the customers they ultimately serve.

Customer empathy is the foundation of customer journeys

When we create a product or sell a service, we aim to provide value by fulfilling a need. In essence—we act with empathy to serve customers. When we investigate who we’re building for and why, we strengthen our relationship with those customers. At the core of sustainable and healthy growth is a strong foundation of happy, retained customers. When we focus on understanding customer needs and creating journeys that fulfill those needs, we are making a significant and tangible investment in increasing customer happiness and retention. Customers that experience outsized value quickly are more likely to retain (and for longer). And while satisfaction means different things across customer segments, immersing ourselves in their experience is the first step to clarifying what makes a satisfied customer.

Analytics helps to scale up customer empathy exercises

I’ve worked closely with researchers and designers to bring qualitative data and deep experiential knowledge to analytics projects. This enables us to integrate customer interviews, survey research, and CRM data to create a holistic view of the customer experience. Not only can we understand the customer experience on a 1:1 level, we can link this experience to business metrics and quantify impact.

Some key questions that signal you’re already practicing customer empathy: Who does this affect? What is their journey? Does this affect how they use our product? What is driving satisfaction or dissatisfaction? How can we make the experience better? How can we know we’re making the customer experience better? How many are affected? How many can we impact?

There are many ways to answer those questions and not one single correct method. Analytics is just one (valuable) tool you can employ. The advantage with having an analytics toolkit is having the option to link qualitative data with quantitative data. Are certain product features associated with higher or lower satisfaction? What customer segments are succeeding in adoption of certain features? Why?

It’s not realistic to survey or interview each of our existing and potential customers. Analytics is a wonderful tool to understand how those results apply to the entire customer population. Analytics is especially helpful for building a case to make changes to the customer journey that are informed by real user experiences and confirmed by a variety of datasources.

Customer empathy is a competitive advantage

Staying connected and grounded in empathy is crucial for customer retention and sustainable growth. Alongside genuinely connecting with customers and listening to their experiences, analytics is a powerful tool to inform customer centered decision making. These decisions can have tangible impact on satisfaction and ultimately retention and business performance.

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